Against Nature Interview with John Brenner: The Painter Paints, the Writer Writes, the Singer Sings (All the Time)
Guitarist/vocalist John Brenner of Maryland outfits Against Nature and Revelation has probably the “healthiest” work ethic I’ve ever encountered when it comes to recording, and by “healthy,” I mean obsessive. Since 2005, Against Nature has put out no fewer than 14 records, and it always feels like the next one isn’t far off — because it isn’t. A little while ago, I reviewed Chasing Eagles, only to find out that Cross Street would be arriving shortly, with Stone over Stone due up thereafter.
They’re a lot to keep up with for sure. Releasing albums through their own Bland Hand Records imprint with art by Brenner himself, Against Nature is the vehicle by which Brenner, bassist Bert Hall, Jr. and drummer Steve Branagan explore their more rocking influences, from the early prog of Rush to the swaggering boogie of Humble Pie. When it comes time to doom out, the same lineup performs as Revelation, which has been active in one incarnation or another since 1986, and in the last two years put out albums through labels such as Japan‘s Leaf Hound, Germany‘s The Church Within, and Pittsburgh‘s Shadow Kingdom.
If two constantly expanding discographies wasn’t enough, Brenner is also partially responsible for the Born to be Doomed festival, which this year featured Revelation alongside acts like Apostle of Solitude, Black Pyramid and Blood Farmers on July 2 and 3, with Against Nature headlining a warm-up show the night before. It was on the first day of the festival that I called for the following interview, and found Brenner, unsurprisingly, to be moving quickly from one thing to the next.
In the conversation after the jump, John Brenner discusses the differences between Revelation and Against Nature, how one band grew out of the other, his writing methods and how he is able to maintain such a prolific level of output. I found him to be friendly, engaging and completely unpretentious. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.
How do you maintain such a rigorous writing schedule? How do you come up with that much material?
(Laughs) I’m just playing all the time. I guess there’s a rhythm where I never play unless there’s a microphone in front of the amplifier. Everything gets recorded and I just sort through it later. If you do that for two weeks or something, you should have an album’s worth of stuff at the end of it. I’m just always, always learning music, playing along with records, and I don’t know where it comes from. It’s kind of odd. I already have enough for another record now, that we haven’t recorded yet. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I was going through the stuff the other day, thinking, well, maybe sometime in August we’ll start recording again (laughs). It’s just because every time I sit down and play by myself I press record and record all of it. You usually get enough stuff to come out. Doesn’t everybody do that (laughs)?
Apparently not. Do you look at bands who take three years between albums as slackers or what?
Honestly, I wonder how they don’t… It’s like painting. If you’re painting and drawing, you work all the time. You always produce things. Not all of it’s great, but you’re still always producing things. That’s why I don’t really understand when it takes somebody years to do something. I just feel like I always need to be working, always need to be making something, and if it’s not so good, then I won’t let anybody hear it. Why shouldn’t it be more – it sounds like I’m telling other people what to do – but for me, why shouldn’t I be always working? Like an artist would, a painter would, a sculptor? That’s kind of cheesy, but three years is good for some people these days.
You get people talking about needing time to grow artistically and in the meantime Against Nature has put out six records.
Doesn’t that strike you as odd? “Grow artistically.” How else do you grow unless you’re working? It seems like you work and that makes you grow and you grow when you work more, and you just keep going. If all you do is think about it and not actually do it, I don’t know. People do it all the time (laughs), so it’s not like the way we do stuff is the best way. Maybe it’s that there’s nothing really at stake for us either. So what if we do five records a year? It’s not like we’re marketing it and there’s this plan. We’re not waiting for anybody to do anything for us.
You can do pretty much whatever you want, you have that freedom because you’re doing it all yourself and it’s not like you’re trying to make a living off it.
Yeah, right. We all go to work and we come home and play. Maybe that’s what it is. If you’re going to do it the professional way, maybe it takes three years to save up $15,000 to make a record. We own all the stuff that we record with and we record in my house, so it doesn’t cost us anything now. The web space isn’t very expensive. I like that, though. I’d be so frustrated. Can you imagine if we had to wait a year for everything? It would take 16 years to do something!
Can you trace the development of Against Nature over the course of the albums? If you go back and listen to the earlier stuff, can you feel how the band has grown? It hasn’t been that long, but it’s a lot of material.
It’s funny. Dave [Depraved] and Eli [Brown] from Blood Farmers are here for the weekend for the festival, so we’ve been hanging out. Eli said something to me about that, he said, “When you listen to that first Against Nature, what in the world do you think?” We weren’t playing Revelation then, so the first things were kind of downtuned and slow, and I guess whatever Revelation would have been if we had called it that, then once we decided we could do Revelation too, we decided, “Alright, we’ll just do the slow, heavy stuff in Revelation, and the other records will be anything we want to do any time we want to do.” We started tuning back up; we tune standard now. We’ve been tuning standard for a little while – I say, “A little while,” six months, five records, whatever (laughs). But for a few years, anyway. All the ‘70s influenced things that I’ve been wanting to do since the late ‘80s or something when we used to say, “Can we really do that stuff or do we have to play doom metal?” And the answer was always you have to do that. I think from moving into the ‘70s melodic Vox stuff we’ve been wanting to play for a while, but who knows, next week it might be like, “Yeah, let’s do Flower Travellin’ Band or something.” It’s just more standard, melodic, not doom metal kind of things, because we like progressive rock so much, Gentle Giant and all the crazy Italian bands, so we do that sometimes. It just keeps going off in different directions. It really is whatever we feel like doing at the time. If I’m on a Free kick or a Humble Pie kick or something, we’re like, “Let’s let that stuff come through,” then if I’m on a Rush kick, “Yeah, let’s do that.” It really is of the moment sometimes.
And you’re always thinking in terms of recording?
Yeah, that’s the big difference. Always. Always. Everything that we do. We actually record more than we rehearse (laughs), because we rehearse only when we have a show coming up, so if we don’t have a show, we set up, and the drum kit always has mics on it, and we’ll sit down and I’ll say, “I have a new song,” and we’re just always recording. Or, if we do a little bit of rehearsal, working out arrangements, it’s always with the aim of “This is going to be recorded in a few days, but let’s get the arrangement down.” But a lot of times we just record it as we’re arranging it.
Are there songs you record and never go back to?
Yeah, jeez. There’s stuff we don’t even know how to play (laughs), because we wrote it and arranged it and recorded it and that was it. Never played it at a show or anything, or never rehearsed it. Against Nature shows have been so tough lately, because we have to say, “What do you want to play?” Then we have to learn it because we haven’t played it since we recorded it. A lot of it does just get left. I kind of like that, just keep moving forward instead of rehashing what we’ve been doing. I like that forward motion. It feels good.
How is it different writing for Against Nature as opposed to Revelation? Against Nature seems much more free where Revelation has a specific purpose. Is that accurate?
Yeah, that’s exactly right. We talked about that. When we decided to do Revelation again, to take the name back and do something with that name again, we actually sat down and were talking, “Well, do we have one band that we just do whatever we want, or what?” We said, if we do Revelation and we do what people – not what they expect, but within a certain range – the three people that listen to it have got to expect something (laughs), and we like doing that, so we figured we’d just keep it going, keep the Revelation thing within a more narrow range. It’s always going to be slow and heavy, certain guitar sounds, certain drum sounds and stuff like that. Then Against Nature, we were like, “Well, if we’re going to do the limited thing with Revelation, then we’ll do Against Nature and we can be real free about it.”
I think a lot of people would probably just take Revelation and go in different directions, but separating Against Nature from that and make it a separate band, I guess timing had to be a part of that, because Revelation wasn’t a band at the time.
Yeah, it really came about because of that. That timing. When we decided, when Bert, Steve and I decided to get back together and have a band, Revelation was still actually in existence with the band that recorded …Yet So Far and the Frozen Masque demo, and I remember talking to Dennis [Cornelius] about that. “We’re gonna start a new band, but I don’t really think I should call it Revelation, and what are you guys doing? Are you gonna make more music?” and it was just all up in the air. Steve and Bert and I were like, “Why don’t we just start over? Get a fresh start on things,” and we picked that name, Against Nature, which was a Revelation song, so I guess it wasn’t that fresh (laughs). If the name was available, I don’t know that we even would have taken it. If those guys hadn’t had plans to keep going, I still think we wouldn’t have chosen the name, but after a year or two of talking to Dennis Cornelius about the name and what they planned to do, he just said, “Take the damn name back, will ya?” but by that time, Against Nature had already played two festivals and recorded 36 records (laughs), so it seemed like too late. We were like, “This is kind of fun, let’s just do both.” But really, it was all about the timing. I have no idea what would have happened if we had said, “We’re gonna be Revelation from now on.” It probably would have been pretty frustrating because we wouldn’t have been able to do all this other stuff.
What can you tell me about Stone over Stone?
Oh, the new one (laughs). It’s a little bit more like the Drawing Arrows record was, and in my mind, that means more Robin Trower or something. More of that free-form jamming Stratocaster sound than that really tight Free/Humble Pie thing that Cross Street is somehow. Eli and Dave were like, “This is Southern rock! Why are you guys playing Southern rock?” (laughs). I think it’s a bit more jamming and a bit more loose. I don’t know. I’m the worst, worst person to ask something like that. I have no idea what it sounds like (laughs). It just sounds like whatever I felt like doing at the moment (laughs). It sounds really snotty, but…
Did Blood Farmers play last night with you guys?
We had this jam. It was so much fun. We played some songs with most of what used to be Iron Man, with three guys who used to be in Iron Man back in the early ‘90s, and played some Sabbath songs. It was amazing. I played “Heaven and Hell” – I haven’t played that since I was probably 16 – and faked my way, shame-faced, through the lead guitar part. Oh, it was impossible. I was just laughing like, “Don’t expect this to be anything like the real thing.” Then Against Nature played and at the end of the night we had this jam session where a whole bunch of people like Josh Hart who used to be in Revelation and Unorthodox and all three of the Blood Farmers guys and Eric Little from Earthride was there, and we played “Four Day Creep” by Humble Pie and Bufflo, “Shylock.” It was just really fun. We played all this ‘70s stuff. We played “Working Man” by Rush and that was a gas. So we played with them, but Blood Farmers proper doesn’t play until tomorrow night.
How did everything come together for Born to be Doomed? It’s a pretty killer lineup. Even a band like Black Cowgirl, who aren’t really known, kick ass.
They’re absolutely great. I’ve known Ben for a while from the Electric Horseman thing, and we played on the radio with Black Cowgirl one time, and that was great. They play in Baltimore. They’re from Lancaster County, but we say, “Yeah, you guys are local.”
Yeah, it’s amazing was gets included in that Baltimore scene.
We’ll just keep extending it. We used to say Penance from Pittsburgh, four hours away. “Penance is a Maryland band.” But everybody who’s playing [Born to be Doomed] is a friend of mine, except the Black Pyramid guys, who I don’t really know well. I just know Andy [Beresky] a tiny bit, but I figured, those guys gotta play. Everybody else I’ve either known for a long time or I’ve become friends with recently. It was just a matter of calling friends up and saying, “Hey man, do you want to come down and play some music.” It wasn’t really such a big deal. Of course I’m saying that now as I’m stressed about if I’m going to be able to pay everybody, if people are going to show up and all that. All that ridiculous stuff. I just want to play music (laughs). It sounds so cheesy, but everybody kind of thinks the same way and feels maybe not a part of something important, but there’s some kind of camaraderie in there, and that’s pretty cool.
What’s next? Obviously more albums and stuff for Against Nature, but are there any plans with Revelation?
We’re playing Dutch Doom Days in November, in Rotterdam. We just got asked to do that, and we have to fly over. We get there on Friday, we play Saturday, we fly back on Sunday because I have to be back to work on Monday, so we can’t even stay. There’s a festival in Switzerland that just asked us to play, but I don’t know if we’re going to be able to afford another $2,000 hit. People treat us really nice and they give us what they can, but it costs us $2,100 just to fly over, and nobody’s gonna give us that kind of money to play. We played shows on tour a couple years ago and we were making like $30. I know, everybody does that, but $2,000 sounds like a lot of money to me. I don’t think I’ve made that much in the entire time I’ve played music if you added it all up. I’m serious. That’s not a stretch. I bet we never made that much from shows. We’re recording a new Revelation record. We were just talking about this. We want to at least start recording it in August, so that whoever’s gonna release it, I guess it’s going to be Shadow Kingdom again, should be able to get it out sometime this year. I’ll finish the overdubs on Stone over Stone, and we’re talking about doing another keyboard-based thing like Action at a Distance was, and I’ve been wanting to do that. I have all these keyboards laying around the house and I’ve got to use them or sell them or something (laughs), so we might do that. Somebody wanted us to come and do a tour in Germany early next year, so I’m hoping we can do that if I can get away. I say that now and it seems like a lot of stuff. It doesn’t feel like it. It just feels like, “Wow, there’s so much time in between those things,” but it’s this accelerated pace.
Do you ever have to stop and step back from it all after a while? Do you ever get overwhelmed?
(Laughs) Yes. Toward the end of recording a record, when there’s that last push when I have to record the vocals and I have to mix it and I have to live with it for a while then mix it again, and I think, when I’m done with this I’ve got to stop for a few months and take some time away from it, then of course, I’ve got three new songs the next week (laughs). It gets overwhelming, but I think that’s okay. I don’t think that’s a bad sign. I think it should be kind of overwhelming sometimes, because we all have our lives too. We all have work and our home lives and other things to do, so I guess it’s okay if it feels overwhelming. It never lasts. As soon as we’re done with this record, I just know I’m going to be like, “Alright guys, let’s arrange a recording session. Let me arrange the drum mics and let’s get to work.” It’s fun. It’s invigorating. Back in the old days with Revelation, it was never like this. It was this endless string of rehearsing the same songs over and over, laboring over every detail of every song and never recording. Now if it’s not so great – it’s never gonna be terrible – but if it’s not perfect, it’s okay, we’ll just do something better next time or try to learn from it and do something else, or just ignore it and get the keyboards out (laughs). Just move on to the next one.
Tags: Against Nature, Bland Hand, Maryland, Maryland doom, Revelation, Shadow Kingdom
